On the recordNovember 28, 2016
while the President-elect is considering additional nominees to fill his Cabinet, we in the Senate--working together with our House colleagues--have our own responsibilities to fulfill before the end of this year. Most pressing is legislation to fund the government, something that unfortunately has been hindered by our Democratic colleagues slow- walking the appropriations process. Actually, calling it slow-walking is a little too generous. What they did is block the normal appropriations process, where the 12 separate appropriations bills would be voted out of committee--which they were, on a bipartisan basis--but then they would come across the floor of the Senate where amendments would be offered, and we would actually vote on them before sending them to the President to be signed into law. Instead of this normal process--which is transparent, it is bipartisan, in the best traditions of the Senate--we were denied the opportunity to do that, resulting now in our need to pass a year-end continuing resolution, kicking the funding of the government over to perhaps sometime in the spring. This was strictly as a result of the gamesmanship of our colleagues, many of them blocking the same appropriations bills they voted for, on a bipartisan basis, before the Appropriations Committee itself. Despite those obstructions, we have actually tried to do some good work. We passed our first bicameral budget since 2009.…
